Key CLA Theories
John Dore
Michael Halliday
Jean Berko-Gleason
Noam Chomsky
Skinner
Jerome Bruner
Piaget
Catherine Garvey
Vygotsky
Roger Brown
Ursula Bellugi
Imitation
Operant conditioning
Positive and negative reinforcement
LAD - Language acquisition device
Universal grammar - children learn languages at a similar rate, in a similar way.
Proposed stages through which children progress as their language and thought mature.
Cognitive development - core of a child's development of understanding is the learning a child undertakes.
Social interactionism - importance of a child's caregiver as key to language development.
LASS - language acquisition support system
Scaffolding enables children to gradually develop their speech.
Considers the importance of play to language development.
Focused particularly on the value of pretend play, which can help vocabulary growth.
Wug test
Fis / Fish theory
Outlined 5 stages of language development that focused on the child's grammatical development in terms of morphology and syntax e.g. the mean length of utterance, types of morphemes used.
3 stages of pronoun acquisition.
3 types of negative formation.
2 - uses the negative within the body of the utterance.
3 - able to attach negatives to the auxiliary verb or copula verb.
1 - adding negative such as 'no' or 'not' to the beginning of an utterance.
2 - child will recognise there is a difference between subject and object pronouns but may not be able to apply this knowledge correctly.
3 - the child will correctly apply subject and object pronouns.
1 - child will use name rather than pronoun.
4 stages of question acquisition.
2 - inversion of auxiliary verbs in order to signify a question e,g, 'Are you coming?'
3 - formulaic 'wh' questions. The presence of 'wh' words as well as auxiliary verb inversion represents the most grammatically complex question.
4 - use of tag questions.
1 - rising intonation of single and then multiple words.
Nativist theory - children are pre-programmed to learn language.
Behaviourist theory
Saussure
Signifier - the word which communicates the idea behind the visual representation.
Signified - visual representation.
Lenneburg
Critical period for acquiring language.
Between the age of 18 months and puberty a child's first language should be acquired.
Between the ages of 2 - 3 there is a readiness for language.